Musk's Twitter rate limits could undermine new CEO, ad experts say
Send a link to a friend
[July 03, 2023] By
Jody Godoy
(Reuters) - Elon Musk's move to temporarily cap how many posts Twitter
users can read on the social media site could undermine efforts by the
company's new Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino to attract advertisers,
marketing industry professionals said.
Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would limit how many tweets per day
various accounts can read, to discourage "extreme levels" of data
scraping and system manipulation.
Users posted screenshots in reply, showing they were unable to see any
tweets, including tweets on the pages of corporate advertisers, after
hitting the limit.
Ad industry veterans said the move creates an obstacle for Yaccarino,
the former NBCUniversal advertising chief who started last month as
Twitter's chief executive officer.
Yaccarino has sought to repair relationships with advertisers who pulled
away from the site after Musk bought it last year, the Financial Times
reported last week.
The limits are "remarkably bad" for users and advertisers already shaken
by the "chaos" Musk has brought to the platform, Mike Proulx, research
director at Forrester, said on Sunday.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2023/Jul/03/images/ads/current/graue_sda_042021.png)
"The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just
got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry
credibility alone," he said.
Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and
former marketing boss at Bank of America, said Yaccarino is Musk's "last
best hope" to salvage ad revenue and the company's value.
"This move signals to the marketplace that he's not capable of
empowering her to save him from himself," he said.
Under the new cap, unverified accounts were initially limited to 600
posts a day with new unverified accounts limited to 300. Verified
accounts could read 6,000 posts a day, Musk said in a post on the site.
Hours later, he said the cap was raised to 10,000 posts per day for
verified users, 1,000 per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for
new unverified users.
[to top of second column] |
![](../images/070323PIX/busine73.jpg)
Twitter logo and a photo of Elon Musk
are displayed through magnifier in this illustration taken October
27, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2023/Jul/03/images/ads/current/bennet_lda_010722.png)
A Twitter spokesperson did not reply to requests for comment and
inquiries about how long the restrictions will last on Sunday.
Capping how much users can view could be "catastrophic" for the
platform's ad business, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at
Insider Intelligence.
"This certainly isn't going to make it any easier to convince
advertisers to return. It's a hard sell already to bring advertisers
back," she said.
The limit came soon after Twitter began requiring users to log into
an account on the social media platform to view tweets, which Musk
called a "temporary emergency measure" to combat data scraping.
Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence
firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter's data to
train their large language models.
Platforms including Reddit and major news media organizations have
complained about AI companies using their information to train AI
models as some have sought fees.
Kai-Cheng Yang, researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington,
said that the limits appeared to be effective in blocking third
parties, including search engines, from scraping Twitter data like
before.
"It might still be possible, but the methods would be much more
sophisticated and much less efficient," he said.
(Reporting by Jody Godoy in New York, Sheila Dang in Dallas, and
Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; editing by Burton Frierson and Nick
Zieminski)
[© 2023 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2023/Jul/03/images/ads/current/charrons_bch_2022.png) |